What was the final outcome of the Cancun climate conference?

Two big things happened at this year's U.N. climate summit. First of all, the Mexican host, led by Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa, delivered on a big package of what we call "building blocks" for a climate treaty. These included an agreement on REDD, which is the part of the treaty that deals with tropical forestry; an agreement on adaptation; an agreement on the architecture for a final climate fund; and an agreement on measuring, reporting, and verifying emissions that different parties claim they can achieve by 2020. This was a big success, and something that we haven't seen in these talks for the last 10 years. Secondly, Secretary Espinosa perhaps set a new precedent for these meetings by overruling one party, Bolivia, who wanted to veto the entire package. Under the rules of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, every single one of the 194 parties actually technically gets a veto to any final outcome. But Secretary Espinosa insisted that because the entire conference—all 193 other parties were in favor of moving forward with this "building block" package, that Bolivia's objections were not sufficient to overrule going forward. This means that hopefully, in the future, other chairs of this meeting will also exercise the same resolve and not let one party spoil the entire package.

What's the next step in establishing an international climate compact?

The package of agreements that have merged from this year's climate summit, impressive as they were, were not enough for a full and complete climate treaty. One of the most important things necessary to move forward is for all the parties to commit to emission reductions, which will actually achieve what we consider to be climate safety, which is holding temperature increases caused by humans to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. Inside the Cancun Agreements, they left markers, which ensure that next year when the parties meet in Durbin, South Africa, in 2011, they will try to answer that problem as well as others moving forward.

Does an international agreement on global warming look likely in the near future?

An international agreement on global warming does look likely in the future, but at the present moment, we really don't know what form that agreement will take. It could be a legally binding treaty, like the Kyoto Protocol, or it could be something else, like a system of pledge and review, where different parties pledge that they will reduce their emissions by some certain date, but there's nothing that actually binds them to doing so. Moving forward, we hope that more work will be done to push for a legally binding treaty, and we also should expect to see that more countries will take climate negotiations out of the diplomatic silo in which they currently exist. Right now, climate diplomacy is separate from other forms of foreign policy, but I expect that in the near future we'll see lots of countries asking each other to move forward on climate policy in exchange for other promises for international cooperation.